


Resonate

by Riona



Category: Zero Escape (Video Games)
Genre: F/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-10
Updated: 2018-05-10
Packaged: 2019-05-04 20:25:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14601030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Riona/pseuds/Riona
Summary: Alone together in the shelter, Carlos and Akane get closer.And then things get weird.





	Resonate

**Author's Note:**

> I just finished playing _Zero Time Dilemma_ , and I have a _lot_ of emotions about C-Team.

For a drifting moment, as Carlos comes back to consciousness, he almost thinks he’s a child again, and Maria’s crept into his bed after one of her nightmares. He tightens his hold on her, his eyes still closed, and...

Something’s wrong.

His eyes snap open. When you’ve seen so many fires, you learn to wake up fast if anything’s off.

He’s on the bare treatment bed in the infirmary, curled around – what – curled around a woman, curled around—

Akane.

_What?_

He sits up sharply, looking around for Junpei. Akane makes a noise of protest and kicks him in the side. She’s gentle about it, at least. He doubts Junpei is going to be as gentle if he sees them like this.

At least they have their clothes on.

“ _Akane_ ,” he says, quiet but urgent. “What happened?”

She frowns. Opens her eyes. “Carlos?”

He should probably say something to explain this, but he has no idea what _this_ is, so he just ends up staring at her until the silence becomes uncomfortable and her eyes widen.

“Were we just...?” She pushes herself off the bed and to her feet, hastily. “Carlos?”

“I don’t know what’s going on,” he says. “Uh, do you remember anything?”

She’s looking around. “Where’s Junpei?”

“No idea,” he says. “Maybe—”

He cuts himself off. Kind of chokes and has to stop talking, actually. He’s just seen the writing on the back of his hand.

_JUNPEI IS DEAD_  
_D-TEAM IS DEAD_  
_DON’T KILL ME_

“Oh—” Akane presses her hands to her mouth, and he knows she’s seen it too.

There’s an awful, awful silence.

Junpei? The whole of D-Team? The vote at 13.30, it must have been. Their plan didn’t work, the note can’t have reached Q-Team, he was stupid to think—

_Junpei?_ What happened to Junpei?

He checks his watch. It’s after midnight.

A lot of time they don’t remember. Enough time for a lot to happen.

“Maybe it’s not true,” he says. His voice is almost steady. “Or it’s some stupid riddle from Zero or something. This isn’t my writing.”

“No,” Akane says. There are tears shining in her eyes. “It’s mine.”

He physically _feels_ that flicker of hope being crushed in his chest. Akane wouldn’t lie about this.

She walks away on unsteady feet, presses herself into a corner of the room, wraps her arms around herself. He wants to go over there, offer her comfort, but... but they woke tangled together, and maybe it’s too strange.

He turns his hand over. More writing on the palm. This time it _is_ his own. _Body in pantry. In pieces. Don’t look. Not worth it._

He lies down and stares at the ceiling and thinks about Junpei.

-

Akane’s sobs die down after a while, and eventually, what feels like several more New Years later, he hears her stirring. He drags himself out of his own head to sit up and look at her. There’s a horrible blankness to her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he says. The words fall straight to the floor between them, useless.

“Do you know how he died?” she asks.

He shakes his head. “All I’ve got is...”

Should he show her? It’s not a pleasant read, but it’ll probably be worse if she stumbles across his body without warning.

He holds out his palm to her, and she walks closer to read it. Her expression doesn’t change.

“Show me the other side again,” she says.

He turns his hand over. _JUNPEI IS DEAD. D-TEAM IS DEAD. DON’T KILL ME._

She breathes out, long and slow.

“Do you know what the last line means?” he asks. “ _Don’t kill me_?”

She nods.

“We’re the only two people in Ward C,” she says.

He almost corrects her without thinking: _no, Junpei’s here as well._ “Yeah. Wait, so...” It hadn’t even crossed his mind. “So who could have...”

_Body in pieces_? It doesn’t sound like an accidental death.

“I wrote that to myself,” she says. “So I knew not to kill you.”

“ _Kill_ me?” Akane? _Akane_ , committing murder? He can’t imagine it.

Which... isn’t good, come to think of it, because it only leaves one obvious suspect.

He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t do something like that, would he?

“So you must have figured out it wasn’t me, right?” he asks. “If you wrote this.”

“If I knew it wasn’t you, I’d have written how I knew,” Akane says. “I suppose I just... decided not to kill you.”

It feels dangerous to say anything in response to that.

There’s a chime.

“ _Now announcing the current casualties. C-Team: Junpei. Q-Team: Q, Eric._ ”

“ _What?_ ” Carlos demands, getting to his feet, over the announcement of _D-Team: Diana, Phi, Sigma._

“Six,” Akane says. “That’s six,” and Carlos feels a sick little surge of hope in the horror – they can get out of here – and—

“ _The X-Door has been opened... and subsequently closed. The successful escapee is Mira. The Decision Game has now been concluded. Thank you for participating._ ”

-

He offers to check the pantry for food while Akane checks the rest of the ward, so she doesn’t have to see it. But the body is gone. _If it was there in the first place,_ he tells himself, trying to hold on to hope, even though he doesn’t see why his own past self would lie about it.

“Enough for a little over a year, if we’re careful,” Akane says when they’ve pooled their findings, his from the pantry, hers from the lounge. “Less if Gab’s still here. He might be in one of the other wards.”

“I know Mira left us behind,” Carlos says, “but I’ll be _really_ pissed off with her if she forgot to take Gab.”

Akane smiles, just a little, just barely, and Carlos hadn’t realised how much he needed to see that.

-

They’re not injected after ninety minutes go by. They’re allowed to keep their consciousness and their memories now, apparently, even if they’ve lost everything else. But the memories from before are still gone.

He’d forgotten for a while to wonder about waking up with Akane; there was a lot more to think about. When it comes back into his mind, he figures it out. Junpei was dead. Diana, Phi, Sigma, all dead. They probably just fell asleep holding each other, looking for comfort. They wouldn’t have gone any... any further than that, not if they’d only had ninety minutes at a time to come to terms with their losses.

Which is a weird thought, because a part of him is wondering: what if they had longer? What if they had the time stretching out in front of them now?

-

There’s only the one bed in the infirmary, and to be honest it’s not that comfortable. They sleep on the facing couches in the lounge instead, or try to. Carlos dozes enough to dream, a little. He’s rolling dice, and he has to get the right numbers, or Junpei and Akane will die.

He wakes to remember that Junpei is already dead.

When he opens his eyes, he sees Akane shivering in her sleep opposite him. Reaching out toward him, just a little.

-

There are a lot of puzzles scattered around the ward in odd places. Pattern-matching puzzles, weird codes, some kind of frustrating thing where you’re supposed to put together a heart shape. Sometimes they seem to be connected together elaborately, and it feels like solving them should lead up to something, but it never does. Maybe that was for while the Decision Game was still running.

The ones in the pantry already seem to have been done. He wonders whether that has something to do with what happened to Junpei, somehow.

(There’s a clue that points towards an arm. There’s no arm here, not that he can see. He glances down at the _In pieces_ on his palm and decides to stop looking.)

Akane goes through all the puzzles with single-minded focus. He’s inclined to space them out himself, if they’re the only entertainment they have for the foreseeable future.

“You like puzzles?” he asks, leaning against the door of the rec room, watching her work on the heart puzzle he abandoned.

“Sometimes,” she says. “I know a lot about them.”

“Puzzle expert Akane Kurashiki,” he says. “Hidden depths. Did you like doing them when you were a kid?”

He’s looking for a light topic of conversation, something other than their situation or the people who’ve died. He’s a little shaken by how serious she looks when she meets his eyes.

“No,” she says.

-

He hasn’t seen her cry since they learnt about Junpei’s death. But she’s crying today, curled up on one of the couches in the lounge.

“You okay?” he asks, hesitating in the doorway.

It’s a stupid question, he knows, but she’s generous enough not to point that out. “Not really.”

He comes closer. “Do you want to talk?”

She rolls onto her back. Lies there for a moment, then sits up. “Do you want to know what happened a year ago?”

“When you were involved in something like this before?” He has been _dying_ to know what happened a year ago. “Well, I mean, only if you want to talk about it.”

She tells him. It takes a while. She’s still tearful at first, stumbles on Junpei’s name, but her voice gets steadier as she speaks.

When he eventually gives in and sits down, it’s next to her rather than on the couch opposite, which feels like a calculated move somehow. It’s not supposed to be, not really. It’s just... well, she’s all he has right now, here, cut off from Maria both by walls and by her illness, cut off from the rest of humanity. He kind of feels like he needs to keep her within reach, so he can grab her if she starts to disappear.

“Okay,” he says at last, when she’s finished. “So what _actually_ happened last year?”

She gives him a small shove. “I’m not lying!”

“You knew I wasn’t going to believe you, right?”

“I know,” she says. “I guess I just wanted to tell you.”

He’s not sure whether to say this. “Well, whether it’s true or not, it’s obvious Junpei’s really important to you.”

“He is,” she says, quietly.

“I didn’t know him for long,” Carlos says. “But I liked him. What I saw of him, at least.”

She gives him a sidelong glance and a smile. “Are you sure? He wasn’t really making himself easy to like.”

Carlos laughs. “I’m good at liking people.”

-

Carlos isn’t actually expecting to be able to batter down the walls of a bomb shelter. But it’s increasingly looking like Mira’s not going to come riding to the rescue, and it’s not like he has anything better to do.

The first thud of the axe into the lounge wall, and for a moment he thinks he’s actually done it.

“Wait. _What?_ ”

The room just... _breaks_ , it looks completely different, suddenly all in white and grey. Right down to the couches they’ve been sleeping on every night. How is that possible?

He turns around.

There are doors he’s never seen before in the wall.

-

The good news is that they’ve got more space in which to live out the rest of their lives than they’d realised.

The bad news is that they find the pod room.

And they find the pods.

And they find exactly what happened to the bodies.

They stumble out of the room, shaking all over. Akane falls to her hands and knees. Carlos presses his head against the wall and curses the small part of him that never quite believed everyone was really dead, the part that let him get hit by this.

-

Akane gathers up every weapon she can find in the facility. Axe. Chainsaw. Crossbow. Assorted guns. Piles them in the corner of the lounge. Carlos watches in increasing unease.

“Hide these from me,” she says, not looking at him.

“You don’t think I... right?”

“No. If the wards were all in the same space, it could have been anyone.” She picks up the axe. Gives him a look that makes him feel the chill of poison working through him. “Hide them from me anyway.”

-

That night, instead of sleeping on her own couch, she climbs onto the one Carlos is already lying on. Tucks herself against him. She doesn’t say anything.

He thinks about asking why.

He puts his arms around her instead, closes his eyes, and somehow holding her helps to keep the memory of the bodies at bay.

The next night she gets onto the couch with him again, and he’s relieved. He didn’t want to have to ask her to.

-

It’s another three nights before he kisses her. It’s on the forehead, gentle, chaste. She doesn’t react, and he thinks she must have fallen asleep already, she must not have noticed.

The next night, she kisses him on the cheek as she settles into his arms.

The night after that she kisses him on the mouth, and he breathes out shakily against her lips, and it feels like a breath he’s been holding for weeks.

-

“Can you tell me what you used to do with Junpei?”

It’s clearly an inappropriate, hurtful question, but somehow that doesn’t really hit him until he’s said it. He didn’t mean it badly. He just... wants to know both of them better.

Akane goes still against him. “What we used to do?”

“Forget it.” He strokes her hair back from her bare shoulder. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“Tell me what you mean,” Akane says.

Looks like he’s not getting away with it. He presses a quick kiss to her throat. “Like this.”

Akane _hmm_ s thoughtfully.

“You don’t have to answer,” Carlos says.

“No, it’s all right,” Akane says. “Junpei and I weren’t really together in that way.”

“What, really?”

“Well, not in this timeline, at least.”

She’d talked a lot about timelines in her weird fake _Titanic_ story. Carlos hadn’t really been able to get his head around it. “Huh. Could’ve sworn.”

Akane’s quiet for a moment. “We never really had the chance.”

“Yeah, guess not,” Carlos says. “If the only times you met as adults were in these messed-up games. Uh, no offence.”

Akane smiles at that. “I won’t deny that it was messed up. I did what I had to.”

-

He was playing solitaire in the rec room; he doesn’t remember moving to the lounge. All the moments kind of blur into each other as the identical days go by. But he’s here, and Akane is here, looking at the useless X-Door. He doesn’t know if she’s noticed him yet.

He leans over her shoulder to lace his fingers through hers. She closes her eyes, turns her head a little so he can press a kiss to her temple—

“What the _fuck?_ ” Junpei asks, extremely loudly.

It’s probably the worst jolt Carlos has ever had, which is saying something, considering that he runs into burning buildings for a living. He jerks away from Akane. “What? Shit!”

“Junpei?” Akane gasps.

Junpei widens his eyes and makes a _you’d better explain this_ gesture. It is definitely Junpei and his head is definitely still attached to his torso.

“You were dead,” Carlos says. He’s staring; he can’t stop. He thinks he can probably be forgiven for that.

“Uh,” Junpei says, “ _no?_ ”

“You were dead, I _saw_ you, you were just a pile of body parts—”

“Okay,” Junpei says. “Let’s say I was dead. I’m back, and I’m pissed.”

“I’m sorry,” Akane says, quietly. “It’s the morphogenetic field.”

“The—” Carlos half-glances at her, snaps his focus back to Junpei. “The what?”

It’s a weird phrase, but something about it is so familiar. He feels he can’t clearly grasp anything right now.

“Carlos,” Akane says, “we never found Junpei’s – his body. Have you noticed where we are?”

What? Carlos looks around. They’re still in the shelter, right?

They are. But they’re in the lounge. The original lounge, not the monochrome space it turned into when the axe hit it.

Carlos’s legs are threatening to give out. “Did we... are we back in time?”

“We’re still trapped together,” Akane says. “But that’s in a different timeline. Our memories from then have transferred to us now. Or at least you must have remembered, and you reminded me when you...” She laces her hands together for a moment. Pauses. “Do you remember what just happened here? _This_ here, now?”

She’s right; it’s like there are different sets of memories tangled up in his head. He tries to sort through them. “We rolled dice,” he says. “And we... died.”

That can’t be right.

“We rolled dice and we lived,” Junpei says. “The part where you die is right _after_ this.”

“Junpei,” Akane says, sternly.

“So what’s your relationship in this other timeline you’re talking about?” Junpei asks, his eyes bright and malicious. “Do you stick it in her, Carlos? Are you packing like Sigma?”

“And how would you know what Sigma’s packing?” Akane asks.

“We don’t – we don’t go that far,” Carlos says, feeling himself flush very slightly. Not like he brought condoms to the Dcom experiment, and they definitely weren’t in a position to raise a potential kid. “Can’t we just have a moment to be glad you’re alive?”

“How far do you go, then?” Junpei asks, sitting on the couch and setting his feet on the low table, like he’s settling in to watch a movie. “Show me how far you go.”

“Look, man, I’m really sor—”

“Carlos,” Akane says, and for a moment the look in her eyes almost makes him forget how to speak. “Let’s show him.”

“Akane?” Carlos asks, a little more high-pitched than he’d intended.

“If he’s going to be like this,” Akane says, very calmly, “he’s going to find out it has consequences.”

-

Akane pushes him onto the unoccupied couch and straddles him, more decisively than ever before. Not that they’ve ever technically done this before, not in this timeline. And Junpei’s watching.

She kisses him, pushes her hands up under his T-shirt, and Junpei’s watching.

“Are you sure about this?” Carlos asks her, quietly.

Akane pauses. “Does that mean you’re not sure about it?”

“ _Obviously_ I’m not sure about it.”

She pulls back, sits up, her knees still on either side of him. “Sorry. I guess I was focusing too much on teaching Junpei a lesson.”

“Keep going,” Junpei says.

“He doesn’t want to,” Akane says. “Looks like we’re sparing your eyes.”

“No,” Junpei says. He swallows. “Keep going.”

It’s not as aggressive as before, and there’s something strange about his breathing. Carlos looks over Akane’s shoulder. Junpei’s stood up, come closer for a better view.

“We’re not going to let you bully us, Junpei,” Akane says.

“Sorry,” Junpei says. “I was being a dick. It’s not like I have any... claim on you, I guess. I’m not gonna force you.” He pauses. “I just... want to see.”

A sly smile spreads over Akane’s face. “Oh, so _that’s_ how it is?”

“Shut up,” Junpei mutters.

Akane looks back at Carlos, silently asking a question.

This is so strange.

He pushes a hand into her hair, kisses her. Eyes closed, but he opens them as he pulls away and catches Junpei’s gaze. Junpei glances away, flustered, and somehow that pushes Carlos to kiss Akane again.

Akane hums appreciatively in her throat as Carlos moves to kiss her collarbone. His hand’s braced on her thigh; he’s not sure whether to move it up under her dress, he’s not sure how far they’re prepared to go in front of Junpei.

“Oh, Junpei,” Akane says, “do you have protection?”

Carlos’s hand slips on her thigh. “What?”

“ _What?_ ” Junpei asks.

They’re prepared to go pretty far, apparently.

“You’re asking me to _help you fuck him?_ ” Junpei asks.

“What’s wrong? You seemed so supportive a moment ago.”

Junpei just stares. Carlos can’t blame him.

“Besides,” Akane says, her expression turning wicked, “who said it was for Carlos?”

“Are you screwing with me?” Junpei asks, a slight tremor in his voice.

“Hmm,” Akane says. “Not yet.”

“Are we absolutely certain this isn’t a dream?” Carlos asks.

Akane strokes his hair, kisses him on the corner of the mouth. “Are you okay with this, Carlos?”

“I mean, I’m pretty weirded out by your method of flirting,” Carlos says, “but I don’t want to come between you.”

“Oh,” Junpei says. “Uh. You’re not staying?”

Carlos looks at Junpei. Really _looks_ at him. Looks at Akane, who’s smiling.

“Do you guys... want me to?” he asks.

-

Carlos lies on the couch, staring at the lights in the ceiling.

They’re counting the weeks in empty cans. Still no sign of rescue from Mira. But someone will come eventually. A lot of people have gone missing, and everyone knows Dcom was the last place they were. He... doesn’t know where this shelter is, exactly, but, going by the décor, he’s pretty sure it’s under Dcom. They’ll figure it out.

Akane’s resting against his chest. At least he’s not completely alone.

He runs his fingers absently through her hair, working out the tangles. There are always a lot of them. No hairbrushes here.

She might be sleeping; it’s hard to tell. Maybe she won’t hear him.

“Do you ever feel like someone else is sleeping here with us?” he asks, quietly.

Akane smiles, her eyes still closed.


End file.
